Microtransactions under 0.01 Bitcoin (BTC) now account for approximately 80% of all daily transactions on the network, driving transaction activity to near record levels despite faint price performance.

The surge pushed Bitcoin’s CryptoQuant “network activity index” into positive territory for the first time since 2024, according to Thursday’s report. report by a blockchain data company.

Transactions under 0.01 BTC accounted for approximately 44% of all daily Bitcoin transactions in 2023, but their share has since almost doubled, mainly due to order, runic and other data recording protocols.

The report, authored by CryptoQuant’s head of research Julio Moreno, said that sustained growth in non-financial activities could “increase competition in the blockchain market and raise economic transaction fees.”

“However, the economic value of these transactions is disproportionately small,” Moreno wrote.

Bitcoin network activity is 7% below the all-time high recorded in September 2024. Source: CryptoQuant

Bitcoin is experiencing a renewal of string congestion

The current congestion remains below the peaks seen during previous Bitcoin write booms, when users embed data such as images, text and token information directly into the blockchain.

Transaction backlogs increased in 2023 as housekeeping and BRC-20 activity competed with regular blockspace transfers, while another spike occurred in slow 2024 after the launch of the Runes protocol.

According to the report, runes, ordinals, BRC-20 tokens and timestamping services generate high volumes of low-value transactions, which helps explain the surge in microtransactions.

OP_RETURN, an opcode that allows data to be embeded on-chain without producing hefty output, reached near-record usage levels in 2026. It divided the Bitcoin community in 2025 after Bitcoin Core developers removed the long-standing 80-byte relay limit. Critics argued that the change would make it easier to operate Bitcoin to store non-financial data.

“The OP_RETURN opcode embeds up to 100,000 bytes of data on-chain without producing issuable output, making it a standard mechanism for Bitcoin data plane protocols,” Moreno wrote.

These protocols generate enormous dust value transaction volumes (as much as 546 satoshi), which directly explains the growth of the low value cohort.

This trend also caused Bitcoin’s memory, the storage area for unconfirmed transactions, to augment to around 128,000 transactions, the highest number of transactions since February 2025.